The Church, the Far Right, and the Claim to Christianity

by Helen Paynter

The recent violence in many of our cities, sparked by the murder of three little girls in Southport on 29^thJuly 2024, have brought back to public attention a number of issues which have long been fermenting in our nation. Clearly these include racism and Islamophobia in some quarters, but the wave of unrest was also tapping into anger around social inequality, such as poverty, unemployment, and substandard housing. What is increasingly clear is that the violence was whipped up by powerful figures on social media, exploited by a core group of inveterate racists, but also then caught up many more people who were drawn to the opportunity to express a general resentment and rage. Nonetheless, the central ideology driving the riots would best be classed as Right-Wing Extremism – a problem which has been growing in the UK in the last few years. A recent publication by the research and pressure group Hope Not Hate, states that “The Radical Right is blossoming. 2023 is the year it came of age.”

The far right of British politics is found in a wide variety of forms, ranging from now-banned organisations such as the neo-Nazi group National Action, to elements within mainstream politics.

The 2024 report by Hope Not Hate plots a significant advance of such movements, even in the past year, both within fringe political movements and within the Conservative Party itself, as well as in popular news outlets such as GB News. This is seen in the shift of the Overton Window, a model used to describe how what is acceptable in public speech can shift over time. In recent years the Overton Window has shifted considerably to the right, permitting many prominent individuals, not least two consecutive Home Secretaries, to express views and use rhetoric which twenty years ago would have been unthinkable.

Far Right actors who are operating within the current political system are promoting an illiberal democracy rather than the overthrow of democracy itself. In many ways, this mainstreaming of far-right discourse makes it even more threatening, because it carries a veneer of acceptability, making it more electable, and more plausible to the Church.

Far-Right groups operate within a variable cluster of ideologies which more-or-less approximately map to the following:

• Ethnic nationalism, white supremacy, racism, anti-migrant rhetoric or similar.
• Anti-degeneracy. This may take the form of singling out certain behaviours for harsh treatment with the rhetoric of “lock them up and throw away the key”; the criminalisation (or worse) of homosexuality or vagrancy; the picketing of abortion clinics and intimidation of staff and patients; and the promotion of certain so-called “traditional gender roles” which serve to oppress and control women.
• Antisemitism. This is quite a variable element, and while some far-right groups will markedly exhibit this, others are markedly pro-semitic, perhaps Zionist.
• Islamophobia. In its various forms, this is a relatively uniform element of far-right political expressions in this country.
• Conspiracism around a variety of issues including climate change denial, holocaust denial, and anti-Islamic conspiracy theories. As an indication of the prevalence of these conspiracy theories, a recent poll of 25,000 members of the general public, published in the aforementioned State of Hate (Hope Not Hate 2024) found that each of these narratives was given credence by between 12% and 34% of respondents. Note that this was a random sample of the general public, not a selected group.

Some of these themes can be appealing to many Christians; and indeed they may intersect with what we might (depending on our own position) consider legitimate theological concerns:

• The idea of ‘cleaning up’ the morality of society is appealing to many who mourn the national decline in ethical standards.
• The Far Right’s restoration of ‘family values’ has links with the authentic biblical themes of fidelity and covenant love.
• The recovery of a ‘Christian’ past in the face of the ‘threat’ posed by Muslim immigrants appeals to a fear of persecution – legitimate in some overseas contexts– and the faithful desire to see the one true God worshipped.

So these can be appealing to many Christians when they hear such policies or rhetoric being offered.

A second reason why far-right movements may be attractive is that for some Christians top-down authoritarianism is normative. David Gushee argues that this is because many Christians are steeped in the pre-modern worldview within which the Bible was written.[1] It is easy to see how this could take place if texts such as Hebrews 13:17 (‘Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account’[2]) are dragged-and-dropped into the contemporary world without the hard-work of exegesis and hermeneutics. Further, Christian tradition has often leaned heavily into authoritarian systems and structures. Consider the top-down hierarchy of the Catholic or Anglican Churches, or the positioning of pulpits ‘six feet above contradiction’ in many churches of the Reformed tradition.

A third reason why the far-right has attraction for contemporary Christians is a reactionary tendency, wherein Christians have tended – rightly or wrongly – to react against cultural moves which they perceive as threatening to their influence or the moral climate. Gushee identifies a number of key moments when such reactionary instincts have been aroused.

The rise of reason and science and weakening of religious authority, the rise of democracy and weakening of monarchy, the rise of worldview pluralism and weakening of the hegemony of Christian ways of organizing reality, the enfranchisement of non-majority religious believers and non-Christians and end of majoritarian Christian power, the rise of secular institutions and weakening of the (dominant) church—all have routinely evoked strong Christian opposition.[3]

In our current climate, there is plenty of evidence that the rise of various feminisms; the Black Lives Matter movement (along with its more controversial academic counterpart Critical Race Theory); the legal shifts around human sexuality and abortion; and the rise in immigration, especially from Muslim-majority nations, have and will continue to provoke a strong reaction among some Christians.

However, what some Christians may fail to appreciate is that Christian-sounding language may be cynically employed by those whose allegiance and values are quite contrary to Christian ones. Here are some examples.

In the lead up to the 2015 General Election, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) published what they called a ‘Christian Manifesto’, headed with the title ‘Valuing our Christian Heritage’. In its foreword, the party’s then leader Nigel Farage wrote ‘Britain needs a much more muscular defence of our Christian heritage and our Christian Constitution… Sadly, I think UKIP is the only major political party left in Britain that still cherishes our Judeo-Christian heritage.’

Nor is this sort of thing simply political posturing. In 2014, members of the political organisation ‘Britain First’ invaded mosques across the UK with army-issued Bibles. The intruders called it a ‘Christian crusade’.  In the following two years, Britain First members made a habit of parading through Muslim-majority areas of several British cities, aggressively flourishing large crosses. Following a series of similar incidents, the two leaders of the organisation were jailed in 2018 for religiously aggravated harassment.

The church needs to take seriously these rhetorics and acts of violence being done in its name. Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel have examined the theological claims made by four different far-right groups in Europe. They say this:

‘Trained theologians might not like [these] political readings of the Bible. Biblical scholars might say that they are historically implausible, that they are hermeneutically incorrect, or that they are wilfully wrong. But these readings are still there. The theologies that run through the far right didn’t appear out of nowhere’. [4]

Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel, 2020, The Claim to Christianity, p.12

In May 2023 the CSBV gathered a group of fourteen invited participants for a 24-hour consultation. They represented an international, ecumenical and inter-faith, and interdisciplinary group, with academic experts in a variety of fields, alongside those with on-the-ground experience of helping the Church respond to democratic threat by extremist groups. (This work was funded by the generous sponsorship of the British Academy.)

Our task was to consider how the UK church should respond to the rise of the radical right. The papers emerging from these discussions will soon be published by SCM as chapters in a book we have entitled The Church, the Far Right, and the Claim to Christianity (ed. Helen Paynter and Maria Power).

At the end of the book I reflect on these discussions, and draws together some common themes and strands, culminating in ten concrete recommendations for the UK Church. A pre-pub version of this chapter can be downloaded here. The ten recommendations are summarised here.

Modern Church will be hosting an online discussion panel at 7 – 8.30pm on Wednesday 2^nd October, 2024, exploring the contents of the book, ‘Christianity and the Far Right’.  Please join me, my co-author Maria Power, and Raj Patta. Raj is a Dalit liberation theologian and a Methodist Minister in Stockport, and will reflect on his personal experience of the recent street violence. Put the date in your diary!

Helen Paynter is a Baptist minister and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence. She is the editor, along with Maria Power, of the book The Church, the Far Right, and the Claim to Christianity.